Acer announced its new Swift 14 AI laptop overnight. The new laptop “ushers in a new era of artificial intelligence with completely new experiences,” which is exactly the kind of phrasing I’d expect from a manufacturer capitalizing on the AI ​​gold rush.

This announcement coincides with Microsoft Build 2024 and its launch of Copilot+.

Heat specifications

Top specs on the Acer Swift 14 AI laptop: It’s a 14.5-inch laptop, powered by your choice of two Snapdragon X processors (Elite X1E-78-100 with 12 cores up to 3.4GHz or Plus X1P-64-100 with 10 cores up to 3.4 GHz). It can be customized with up to 32GB of dual-channel SDDR5 RAM and up to 1TB of Gen4 NVMe storage. An integrated Qualcomm Adreno GPU and Hexagon NPU (neural processing unit, used for the device’s AI applications) round out the internals, but the press release did not list specific model numbers. Acer says the exact specs will arrive closer to when the unit goes on sale in July, so keep an eye out for those.

The display is, as stated, a 14.5-inch IPS display with a maximum resolution of 2560×1600 in a 16:10 aspect ratio and a 120 Hz refresh rate. Although it is not touchscreen by default, you can request it as an option in your order.

Finally, there is a 3-cell Li-ion battery of 75 Wh, with fast charging. Acer says you can get up to 18 hours of web browsing and 26 hours of video playback from the battery. We’re not sure how video playback requires less juice than basic browsing, and we’re looking forward to trying it out once we get a review unit.

All this is packed into a thin aluminum frame weighing 1.36 kg.

AI stuff

Most of Acer’s AI platform is built on Microsoft’s Copilot AI, which is already being introduced for Windows 11. It’s called Copilot+ because Acer has built several new AI apps themselves, and also because everything in 2024 must have a ‘+’ attached to it as a hopeful synonym for ‘value’. First, there’s Recall, an app that can help users “easily find everything they’ve seen on their computer by simply describing the clues they remember. With an explorable timeline, users can easily navigate through time to return to previously used apps, documents or messages.” That sounds like an overcomplicated History tab, if you ask me, but ok.

Live Captions does exactly what it sounds like, adding automatic subtitles and English translations to any live video or pre-recorded video from a library of 44 languages. We have already seen attempts at this struggle with accents and regional dialects. I’m curious to see how Acer’s approach will pay off.

There’s an AI chatbot and an image generator, because of course there is. It’s called Cocreator, although it doesn’t really do anything, it just throws existing data into blender and spits out the result. Auto Super Resolution for gaming sounds like the Nvidia DLSS we have at home. Windows Studio Effects apparently makes your video calls look better, something Google Meets has been doing for years.

Based on press materials alone, the Acer Swift 14 AI sounds like an ideal laptop for extremely lazy and uncreative office workers. I’m sure they’ll sell a ton of them.

The Acer Swift 14 AI will be available in Australia at the end of July. Prices will start at $2,199.

A previous version of this article listed the weight of the Acer Swift 14 AI laptop at 1.68 kg and a battery life of 16 hours, based on information from Acer’s press release. That press release has since been updated with the correct 1.36kg weight and longer battery life. The article has been updated to reflect these changes.